I suggest that this is precisely the concept that you are searching for.
No.
The point of talking about control is to lay part of the groundwork for understanding what determines what directions a mind ends up pushing the world in.
This notion of control is fine but doesn’t answer the question.
what determines what directions a mind ends up pushing the world in.
What determines what directions a mind ends up pushing the world in is that mind’s purposes — the reference values of its control systems. These determine the narrow class of states towards which it herds the world state, at all levels from seeking water to quench thirst, to striving for grand political ideals.
Sure, if the mind really is some control systems and you know how it’s some control systems and where their reference points are and how they combine. You don’t know that so it’s not a good enough answer, and I don’t see a good reason to restrict to this one model-piece, in trying to find ideas that could provide a good enough answer.
There are many theories of what the mind is and how it works, and nobody knows which if any of them are right. I have presented one idea (not originating with me, BTW), and I do not see a reason in what you have said to exclude it from the ideas that could provide a good enough answer.
But the question, “what determines what directions a mind ends up pushing the world in” is somewhat vague, and perhaps you are looking for a completely different sort of thing than a theory of how the mind works.
The idea of control system shouldn’t be excluded, but it’s far from answering the question. Even if the answer does look like “it’s a control system”, we still don’t know HOW minds (e.g. human minds) are control systems—we’d want to be able to look at a mind and then say “oh, see, it’s a control system, here’s the action-selector and here’s the reference value and here’s the comparator” and so on. And we would still want to understand whence comes the reference point, and whence comes the language in which the reference point is stated. Though I’m skeptical that a satisfying answer could look like that.
Perhaps I should have given more of the background. Hang on, I did. The theory is not that the mind “is a control system”, but that it and the body are made of control systems, very large numbers of them, arranged in a particular hierarchical way, the output of higher-level systems providing the references for those in the layer below. At the foot of the hierarchy is muscular control and biochemical control loops. The lower levels of this are standard physiology and biochemistry. The upper levels are more speculative, and there is as yet not even conjectures about the morphogenesis of the whole hierarchy, i.e. how it is built during development. (For that matter, not much is known about physical morphogenesis either.)
It seems to me that TsviBT is trying to figure out for good which of them is definitely right in terms of the concept of what control is in all cases and contexts.
Yet he objects that I do not know if what I described is definitely right. No-one knows what is definitely right. If he wants to find out, all that other people can contribute is possible ideas for him to measure against whatever the idea in his mind is. Well, I have given one. What he does with it is up to him.
No.
This notion of control is fine but doesn’t answer the question.
What determines what directions a mind ends up pushing the world in is that mind’s purposes — the reference values of its control systems. These determine the narrow class of states towards which it herds the world state, at all levels from seeking water to quench thirst, to striving for grand political ideals.
Sure, if the mind really is some control systems and you know how it’s some control systems and where their reference points are and how they combine. You don’t know that so it’s not a good enough answer, and I don’t see a good reason to restrict to this one model-piece, in trying to find ideas that could provide a good enough answer.
There are many theories of what the mind is and how it works, and nobody knows which if any of them are right. I have presented one idea (not originating with me, BTW), and I do not see a reason in what you have said to exclude it from the ideas that could provide a good enough answer.
But the question, “what determines what directions a mind ends up pushing the world in” is somewhat vague, and perhaps you are looking for a completely different sort of thing than a theory of how the mind works.
The idea of control system shouldn’t be excluded, but it’s far from answering the question. Even if the answer does look like “it’s a control system”, we still don’t know HOW minds (e.g. human minds) are control systems—we’d want to be able to look at a mind and then say “oh, see, it’s a control system, here’s the action-selector and here’s the reference value and here’s the comparator” and so on. And we would still want to understand whence comes the reference point, and whence comes the language in which the reference point is stated. Though I’m skeptical that a satisfying answer could look like that.
Perhaps I should have given more of the background. Hang on, I did. The theory is not that the mind “is a control system”, but that it and the body are made of control systems, very large numbers of them, arranged in a particular hierarchical way, the output of higher-level systems providing the references for those in the layer below. At the foot of the hierarchy is muscular control and biochemical control loops. The lower levels of this are standard physiology and biochemistry. The upper levels are more speculative, and there is as yet not even conjectures about the morphogenesis of the whole hierarchy, i.e. how it is built during development. (For that matter, not much is known about physical morphogenesis either.)
So there it is: consider it, or not.
It seems to me that TsviBT is trying to figure out for good which of them is definitely right in terms of the concept of what control is in all cases and contexts.
Yet he objects that I do not know if what I described is definitely right. No-one knows what is definitely right. If he wants to find out, all that other people can contribute is possible ideas for him to measure against whatever the idea in his mind is. Well, I have given one. What he does with it is up to him.